“There can be no doubt that once again, as in Nanking and Shanghai, the Japanese Armed Forces have shown themselves to be absolutely ruthless, barbaric and brutal.”
—LT. COL. EDMUND STONE,
REPORT, FEBRUARY 26, 1945
MILITARY STAFF CARS ROLLED UP OUTSIDE NEW BILIBID Prison some twenty-five miles south of Manila on October 5, 1945, carrying the American lawyers chosen to represent General Yamashita in his upcoming war crimes trial. The six-member defense team consisted of Col. Harry Clarke, Lt. Cols. Gordon Feldaus and Walter Hendrix, Maj. George Guy, and Capts. Frank Reel and Milton Sandberg. Few had wanted the assignment. The war had been over barely a month, and tensions remained high. The ruins of Manila served as a daily reminder of the horror that had unfolded in the Philippine capital eight months earlier. Furthermore, representing a defendant described by the Washington Post as “one of the most hated of all the Japanese” shined an unwanted spotlight on the families of the lawyers back home in America. “I feel sure he will do his best since defending Yamashita is his duty,” Mary Hendrix told the Atlanta Constitution. “This is one case I am hoping my husband will lose.”
A trigonometry teacher at Altoona High School in Pennsylvania went so far as to single out Colonel Clarke’s niece Thelma one day in class. “How do you feel,” he asked, “about your uncle being a traitor?”
The public hostility was not lost on the lawyers whose job was to fight for the life of a man who only weeks earlier had been their sworn enemy. But the rancor ran deeper. As the senior commander in the Philippines, Yamashita served as the face of the barbaric military that had raped and murdered tens of thousands and destroyed the Pearl of the Orient. Even his lawyers were not immune from such feelings. Colonel Feldhaus personally viewed Yamashita as a savage. “Our feelings towards our unwanted client were at first somewhat antagonistic,” he wrote. “I personally was quite bitter about having been appointed counsel on his case.” Major Guy felt the same. “We had all seen the ravages and destruction in Manila itself and many of us had seen similar sights out in the provinces and in other cities in the Philippines,” he wrote. “We all knew that Yamashita was entitled to a defense, but we all wondered, ”Why does it have to be us?’ ”
The defense lawyers swallowed such personal views that Friday as they prepared to meet their infamous new client for the first time. Military police escorted them to the chapel, which would serve as the conference room. The lawyers requested Yamashita and his senior officers. “So you’re the guys that have to defend these monkeys, are you?” one of the prison officers said as the men waited for the general’s arrival.
Yamashita had spent the month since his surrender in a ten-by-fifteen-foot cell on the prison’s death row, his only furnishings a cot, a table, and two chairs. American officials had interviewed him and his senior staff multiple times, and on each occasion the general had cooperated. Interrogators had found him to be strong, humble, and soldierly, rating him “as intelligent, but not profoundly so.” The bespectacled Muto, in fact, was described as “the real brains of the combination.” Furthermore, interrogators noted Yamashita had shown “an almost childish interest recounting his own campaigns and in finding out how much we had actually known of his movements and situation.”
Lt. Samuel Stratton couldn’t help but record another of the general’s quirks. “He was a terrific cigarette moocher,” he recalled. “Whenever I would question him, I would leave my pack of cigarettes on the table and invite him to have one. The pack usually was empty by the time the interview was concluded.”
But the otherwise gabby general turned evasive when pressed to describe what had happened in Manila, stating that he had never planned to defend the capital; American forces had arrived before all the troops evacuated and forced a fight, a statement that failed to take into account Admiral Iwabuchi’s extensive efforts to fortify Manila. He likewise claimed ignorance of any of the atrocities, blaming poor communications, even though, as other senior officers in Baguio would later attest, Yamashita maintained radio contact with Manila through at least the middle of February. By that time, Japanese forces had committed the worst of the massacres. Yamashita furthermore was in contact through June with the Shimbu Group commander General Yokoyama, who was Iwabuchi’s superior officer. Beyond the Philippines, Yamashita received reports throughout the duration of the war from Tokyo and abroad. Through those broadcasts he would have learned that Spain—in news trumpeted worldwide—had severed ties with Japan in April over the slaughter of so many of its nationals in Manila, including the torching of its consulate and the murder of its diplomatic personnel.
Other senior Japanese leaders took the same approach. Everyone seemed to know just enough of the horror that unfolded in the capital to know it was safer not to be associated with it. The obfuscation clearly frustrated interrogators, as evidenced by one summary: “Neither Gen. Yamashita nor his Chief of Staff, nor for that matter, any of the officers interviewed, would accept any responsibility for the Battle of Manila.”
“I don’t know,” interviewers noted, was the rote explanation.
Interrogators didn’t buy it.
The death of the commanding officer in Manila made for an easy scapegoat, a rogue officer who had taken it upon himself to destroy a city and butcher its inhabitants. But would one field commander really be so brazen as to order the liquidation of tens of thousands of innocent civilians without at least tacit approval from his superiors? “Another explanation,” one report suggested, “is that Yamashita was quite well aware of the progress of the entire battle but thought it best to let the responsibility fall on Admiral Iwabuchi, who was eventually killed in the Agriculture Building. It seems unlikely that their communications were as bad as they made them out to be.”
Yamashita would now face a similar grilling from his lawyers, who would use his statements in the coming weeks to help build a defense before the start of the trial.
Military police escorted Yamashita, Chief of Staff Muto, Maj. Gen. Naokata Utunomiya, and interpreter Masakatsu Hamamoto across the prison courtyard and into the chapel. The Japanese bowed to the altar and then turned and bowed to the lawyers. “It must have been difficult for the conqueror of Malaya to bow as he did in the Japanese fashion to Lt. Colonels and Captains of the American army,” Feldhaus wrote. “However, this he did, in a most respectful manner, with a complete lack of arrogance.”
Colonel Clarke introduced the lawyers, who were all curious to meet the notorious general. Guy fixated on Yamashita. Though tall by Japanese standards, the general was still lean from his months in the mountains, making it appear that his loose Japanese field uniform swallowed him. “His head seemed to be unusually large, particularly so for a Japanese and the face was marked with heavy lines,” Guy wrote. “His neck was thick and bull like and the back of his neck and head ran in almost a vertical line from the white shirt collar which was turned down over his tunic collar.”
Hamamoto opened his mouth and surprised the lawyers with his perfect English, all of whom were curious to know where he had learned to speak the language. “Harvard,” he answered. “Class of ’27.”
The lawyers explained that the United States planned to prosecute Yamashita for war crimes. Three days earlier the prosecution had served the general with a single sweeping charge, accusing him of failing to execute his duty as a commander and prevent his forces from committing brutal atrocities in Manila and elsewhere in the Philippines. Muto professed his shock at the news, which was disingenuous given his own sordid history with Japanese barbarity. Yamashita’s chief of staff, in fact, had served as a senior officer in China during the Rape of Nanking—and was present in that city at the time of some of the worst atrocities. “To me the idea of General Yamashita’s being indicted as a war criminal is something the like of which I have never seen in a dream,” Muto said later. “I was absolutely astounded when I learned about it.”
Yamashita likewise objected, claiming he had never heard of any such atrocities. “We cut him short,” Reel recalled. “There was no doubt about it. The atrocities could certainly be proved. What we were concerned about was the question of any connection that the general might have had with them. What we wanted to know, first, was how in the world so many brutalities could be committed and he not know about them.”
Yamashita walked them through Japan’s disastrous campaign for the Philippines, from Leyte through MacArthur’s invasion of Lingayen Gulf.
“Where did the city of Manila fit into this picture?” lawyers asked.
Yamashita largely stuck to the same story he had told army interrogators earlier. “I decided to put Manila outside of the battle area,” the general said. “I ordered my troops out of Manila. I decided to abandon it without a battle.”
The lawyers pressed him on the Battle of Manila. If he had ordered everyone to leave, then why was the city destroyed? Yamashita blamed the navy. “The Japanese army had moved out. There were only fifteen or sixteen hundred army troops left in the city, and their essential mission was to guard those military supplies that had not yet been removed,” he said. “But there were approximately twenty thousand Japanese naval troops who did not move out, and they were the ones who fought the Americans.”
The lawyers pressed him to explain why Iwabuchi had failed to follow repeated orders and withdraw from the city.
The general could not give an answer. “It was entirely contrary to my plans for Manila,” he maintained.
Throughout the interview, the attorneys noted, Yamashita’s answers remained consistent. “His forthright manner, his candor and his strength of character made a distinct impression on me that first interview and those qualities continued to impress me as time went on and as my contacts with him became more frequent,” Guy wrote. “I am confident that my associates on the defense staff had the same impressions.”
Before the conference concluded, the attorneys asked one final question: “When surrender was unavoidable, why hadn’t the general committed suicide?”
Yamashita said such an action would have violated his orders, which mandated that he surrender and cooperate with the Americans.
But Tojo had attempted to kill himself, the lawyers pointed out.
“Yes,” Yamashita replied. “Tojo disobeyed the order of his emperor.”
CROWDS QUEUED UP outside the High Commissioner’s Residence on Dewey Boulevard on the afternoon of October 8, all awaiting a chance to watch the arraignment of General Yamashita. The impending trial of the Tiger of Malaya promised to be the main attraction in a city that still remained in such ruin that heavy rains prompted the dead to float up out of shallow graves. American engineers had restored limited power and water, though most residents depended on candles and coconut oil lamps. It was a similar story with Manila’s roads. The army had repaired the ones needed to move troops and supplies, but the rest remained pockmarked with foot-deep holes and were often impassable in the heavy rains. The lack of housing proved another crisis, prompting primitive huts made of salvaged lumber and corrugated metal to mushroom in the ruins of once-grand buildings. “Manila was for the greater part a shack-town,” Hartendorp had observed, “a sprawling, giant slum.”
The city’s broken economy had triggered a robust black market. A rash of bootleg liquor had killed dozens, including more than twenty American soldiers and left another six blind. The streets teemed with prostitutes and pimps and crime soared. “The fearsome Japs are gone,” remarked an editorial in the Manila Post, “but the hoodlums and hold-up gangs infest the streets, waylaying peaceful, law-abiding citizens; break into homes, rendering it impossible for city residents to enjoy freedom from fear.” Leftover land mines only added to the anguish, killing more than two hundred and injuring four times as many. Only a few weeks earlier a bulldozer ran over a buried five-hundred-pound aerial bomb off Dewey Boulevard, triggering a spectacular explosion that killed one, wounded two others, and left a crater five feet deep and twenty-two feet wide. The population, as Hartendorp wrote in a September op-ed, was shell-shocked. “This country has suffered not only widespread destruction, devastation, and death, but also the mental traumas which result from prolonged periods of misery, grief, fear, and hate.”
Into this devastated city, Yamashita now returned, the man most held responsible for the despair and misery. Outside the High Commissioner’s Residence—a few blocks south of the Manila Hotel and ground zero for some of the city’s worst destruction—long lines formed this Monday, so many that vendors showed up to hawk ice cream, creating a carnival-like atmosphere. Workers inside had scrambled to transform the semicircular ballroom—its white plaster ceiling and pale blue walls still scarred by shrapnel—into a makeshift courtroom. Seven French doors offered views of the American ships anchored in Manila Bay; two crystal chandeliers that had survived dangled from the high domed ceilings. A rectangular table with leather chairs for the judges sat atop a plywood stage, while immediately in front of it stood a witness stand, interpreter station, and opposing desks for the prosecution and the defense.
MacArthur’s staff had laid the groundwork for what would prove to be the first war crimes trial in the Pacific. Neither a court-martial nor a civilian trial, the proceedings would be a hybrid, best described by one journalist as an “Allied legal laboratory.” MacArthur’s staff had drafted twenty-two rules that would govern the trial, running to just seven pages. Those rules spelled out Yamashita’s rights to defense counsel and indeed advance copies of all the charges against him and translated copies of all testimony and records. The defense could call and cross-examine witnesses, who would have to give testimony under oath. The regulations governing evidence, however, were loose at best, described simply as anything the commission deemed “would have probative value in the mind of a reasonable man.” “The rule of evidence,” noted New York Times reporter Robert Trumbull, “can be boiled down to two words: anything goes.”
Maj. Gen. Russel Reynolds served as the presiding judge. The fifty-year-old Michigan native was joined by two other major generals and two brigadier generals. These five officers would decide Yamashita’s fate. The defense was wary of the judges, who were all subordinate to MacArthur and unlikely to buck his wishes. Furthermore, none were combat soldiers, making it hard for them to appreciate the tactical mess Yamashita had inherited when he landed in the Philippines. More important, not a single one had any legal training. “It was,” Captain Reel later wrote, “far too much to expect laymen without legal assistance on the bench to understand the trial of a case of this type, a case that was to make fundamentally new law and that would necessarily involve hundreds of legal decisions on matters of evidence, international law, the construction of congressional statutes, and the interpretation of treaties.”
Maj. Robert Kerr led the prosecution. A forty-one-year-old Oregonian and graduate of the University of Michigan law school, Kerr prided himself on the fact that he was not a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps but was an infantryman, a “mere soldier,” he liked to say. Four captains, all of whom had served as district attorneys in civilian life, assisted Kerr. Lastly Maj. Glicerio Opinion rounded out the prosecution, the only Filipino on the team. In comments to the reporters on the eve of the arraignment, Kerr announced that he would seek the death penalty for Yamashita. Over the course of the trial, he said he would introduce as many as one thousand exhibits, including captured Japanese orders, diaries, and victim statements. The crimes committed by the general’s troops, he said, occurred not just in Manila but throughout the archipelago. “I’m amazed myself at the universal pattern of atrocities—of what the Philippine people went through,” he said. “If we gave them all, this trial would go on for months.”
The courtroom was packed that Monday afternoon, confirming the decision to hold a dress rehearsal the day before. Loudspeakers dangled from the ceiling overhead, while the bright klieg lights only drove up the heat and humidity. Officials reserved fifty seats for accredited journalists, including three motion picture cameramen from the Signal Corps perched in the balconies, plus a few extra seats in the first row for visiting dignitaries. The remaining three hundred spots were open to the public, though hundreds ultimately had to be turned away in the end for a lack of space. Seventy-five military police, wearing white helmets and gloves, stood guard. Officers frisked all spectators for weapons, aided by four Manila policewomen who searched the females.
Many dignitaries turned out, including General Styer and First Lady Esperanza Osmeña in a white mestiza dress. She was joined in the front row by her daughter Rosie, who wore a corsage in her dark hair, and her daughter-in-law, Mary, the widow of Osmeña’s son, Emilio, who was executed by the Japanese. “The arraignment,” one of Yamashita’s lawyers said, “was a gala affair.”
“Attention,” the bailiff called out at two p.m.
Everyone stood.
The commission members filed in and sat on the dais. Military police then escorted Yamashita inside at 2:02 p.m. All eyes focused on the Japanese commander, whom Colonel Clarke had ordered to dress as sharply as possible. The general wore a green uniform with high cavalry boots and gold spurs. Four rows of campaign ribbons adorned his left breast. Prosecution trial assistant George Mountz described Yamashita’s entry in a letter: “He hesitated, bowed slightly, with respect but not servitude & sat down.” There was little doubt Yamashita was nervous this afternoon in a courtroom operated by his former enemy. “Sweat gleamed at the roots of his close-cropped graying hair, as he took his seat next to his American defense counsels,” one journalist wrote. “He held his cap uncertainly, laid it on the table and then placed his hands on it.”
News reporters proved anxious to glimpse the fabled commander, who had fallen from his lofty perch as a powerful general to prisoner of war. Newsweek called him the “Toothless Tiger,” while the Los Angeles Times labeled him the “Gopher of the Philippines.” Other media outlets, reflecting the racial hostility so prevalent during the war, fell back on other stereotypes, describing him as having “beady” and even “rat-like eyes.” Time magazine characterized him as a primitive monster. “He looked like an ogre—a squat, shaven-headed, simian figure in a green uniform.”
“They’ve fattened him up for butchering,” one reporter quipped, noting that Yamashita had gained weight in the month since he surrendered.
Amid the illumination of floodlights and the pop of flashbulbs, Yamashita stood center stage as a symbol of the cruel Japanese regime that had slaughtered hundreds of thousands, not just in the Philippines but also in the cities and villages of China, Malaya, and elsewhere. The same day as the arraignment, Australian officials requested the United States, if unable to convict Yamashita for any reason, hand him over so he could be tried for the atrocities his troops committed during the Malayan campaign. Prosecutor Kerr later described in a letter the raw emotions surrounding the trial. “It probably is impossible for anyone who was not on the scene to conceive of or understand the feeling of outrage, hatred and vengefulness of the people of the Philippines who had suffered long years of barbarous mistreatment by the forces under Yamashita’s command.” That was true outside in the streets, where American forces guarded Japanese prisoners of war, who worked from dawn to dusk cleaning up battle debris. “Guards keep their carbines pointed at the populace,” reporter James Halsema observed, “not at their prisoners.”
Reynolds began the afternoon’s arraignment, stating that the commission would hear evidence from the prosecution and defense before determining the general’s guilt or innocence. If convicted, the commission would decide his sentence.
“The proceedings,” the judge said, “will be conducted in a fair and impartial manner, which is traditional American justice.”
Kerr introduced for the record the orders establishing the basis for the commission. The prosecutor then noted that a certified copy of the charge against Yamashita was served on him on October 2 at New Bilibid Prison. “Whom does the Accused desire to introduce as Defense counsel?” Reynolds asked.
“I am happy to accept the choice of the Commission as to my counsel,” Yamashita said through an interpreter. “I am highly honored to have been given such distinguished persons to represent me.”
Yamashita requested to have his chief of staff Muto and his deputy chief of staff Naokata Utsunomiya serve as additional counsel. “There are a number of records and facts with which they alone are conversant. I need their advice and assistance.”
The prosecutor objected, arguing that both men planned to testify on behalf of Yamashita, but Reynolds shot him down. “The Accused has stated his belief,” he said. “It is the desire of this Commission to conduct a fair trial; accordingly, subject to objection by any member of the Commission, the request of the Defense is granted.”
Kerr pointed out that both would later stand trial. Furthermore, the prosecution refused to recognize either by their former titles. “We maintain, sir, that the day when Yamashita had his Chief-of-Staff or Assistant-Chief-of-Staff is over.”
Reynolds ordered the single charge against Yamashita read aloud. Afterward, the judge asked if the defense was ready to enter a plea.
Colonel Clarke challenged the charge, arguing that it failed to state a violation of war actually committed by Yamashita. There were no times, dates, places or specific actions, just the broad charge that he had failed to control his troops.
Kerr said the prosecution had compiled a Bill of Particulars, outlining individual accounts of atrocities. He added that the full list of atrocities was not yet complete and requested permission to file additional charges at a later date. “We have certain new information just recently received which we have not had an opportunity so far to incorporate in the Bill of Particulars,” Kerr said. “If we may have assurance that later we may file a supplemental Bill of Particulars, we are willing to proceed.”
The defense objected but was overruled.
The court recessed for fifteen minutes to allow prosecutors to present the defense with the Bill of Particulars, a nineteen-page list of sixty-four atrocities. The massacres outlined proved widespread, from murdering almost 150 American prisoners of war on the island of Palawan to killing 25,000 Filipinos in Batangas Province. Many others focused on the horror inside the Philippine capital, ranging from starving internees at Santo Tomas to slaughtering civilians at De La Salle, the Red Cross, and Fort Santiago. “The charges,” Newsweek wrote, “read like a chamber-of-horrors indictment.”
The court returned at 3:25 p.m., at which time commissioners set a trial date of October 29. “The Accused,” Clarke said, “is ready to plead.”
“General Tomoyuki Yamashita,” Reynolds announced, “at this time the Commission will hear your plea to the Charge and specifications which have been read to you. You may plead either guilty or not guilty.”
Flashbulbs exploded and movie cameras rolled as the judges, lawyers, and hundreds of spectators focused on the former Tiger of Malaya.
“My plea,” Yamashita said, “is not guilty.”
YAMASHITA’S LAWYERS HAD THREE WEEKS to prepare the general’s defense before the opening day of trial. Attorneys secured a battered two-story home with a high stone wall on Taft Avenue to serve as the team’s legal command center, where guards could truck Yamashita in daily in the back of an ambulance to keep the populace unaware. Secrecy was paramount. “There were,” George Guy noted, “thousands of Manilans who would have welcomed the chance to take the law into their own hands.”
The job facing the defense was gargantuan. American investigators had spent months interviewing survivors, collecting evidence, and building a case. To follow up on those investigations—a job that would require interviews with hundreds of witnesses scattered across the Philippines—would take months at best, time the defense simply didn’t have. Under such constraints, the lawyers decided it was impossible to put forth an alternative explanation for the carnage in Manila but chose rather to focus solely on defending Yamashita on the prosecutor’s charges.
Guy hopped a plane to Japan to round up character witnesses, while the others worked with Yamashita to review the atrocities detailed in the Bill of Particulars. That included interviewing any Japanese prisoners of war who might provide insight into what happened. Lawyers likewise focused on the challenges Yamashita faced as a commander, from the byzantine chain of command to his poor communications, inferior troops, and lack of food. The general’s only alibi, his lawyers determined, was that overwhelmed by superior American forces, he had left everything else in the hands of his subordinates. “We worked every day,” Reel said, “every Sunday, every evening.”
The lawyers faced additional struggles, including trying a case amid a hostile local populace in the center of devastated Manila. “By virtue of this press buildup, Yamashita was already convicted in the eyes of the world, and certainly in the eyes of the Filipinos, even before a shred of evidence had been introduced against him,” Guy wrote. “The task confronting the defense seemed enormous indeed.”
The defense’s job soon became even tougher.
At four p.m. on October 26—the Friday before the Monday start of the trial—a messenger arrived to serve Yamashita’s team with a supplemental Bill of Particulars. The prosecution had added fifty-nine new atrocities. “We were dumbfounded,” Reel recalled. “We had expected that perhaps one or two or three new items might be added; but here we were, just two days before trial, and the charges that we would have to meet were almost doubled—from sixty-four to one hundred and twenty-three, and practically all of them involving new places, new persons, new witnesses.” Going forward at this point was impossible. The defense had no option but to request a continuance, a move Yamashita’s lawyers knew the judges would resist given the intense publicity. “The power behind the Commission was in a hurry,” Reel wrote. “But after we had worked day and night for three weeks on sixty-four items of a Bill of Particulars, the Commission simply could not refuse us some time to prepare for fifty-nine new ones.”
On the night before the trial opened, attorneys allowed Pat Robinson of the International News Service to interview Yamashita, whom American servicemen had stopped calling the Tiger of Malaya in favor of the Louse of Luzon. The general asked Robinson if he thought the American press would be fair to him. Robinson said he did. “That’s very good,” Yamashita replied. “I recognize more than ever the American spirit of fair play, which I had not previously realized would work in my favor.”
Robinson told Yamashita that if he was found guilty, he would likely be hanged, a statement that made the general laugh as he gripped his neck with both hands.
“I don’t see how I can be convicted, any more than the United States President or General MacArthur could be if American troops had committed atrocities,” Yamashita countered. “How can I be convicted of crimes I didn’t even know about?”